An ongoing concern in the medical profession is the containment of labor costs, especially the cost of nursing and other patient monitoring personnel. One way to minimize costs is to find ways to allow fewer nurses to monitor larger numbers of patients without jeopardizing patient safety. In addition, hospitals are discharging patients earlier, allowing them to recuperate at home rather than in the hospital. In a typical hospital setting, nurses must periodically check the patients' vital signs, to administer doses of medicine, and to attend to requests or problems reported by patients. Where patients are recuperating at home or in far-flung branches of a large hospital, however, it is especially difficult for nursing personnel to monitor those remote patients in a cost-effective manner.
Another concern in the medical profession is the accurate administration of prescription medication to patients. Typically, prescription medicine is administered at periodic dosing intervals during a day. These dosing intervals are determined by a dosing schedule established by a treating physician. Medical support personnel administer doses of medication by retrieving the prescribed doses from bulk medicine supplies at the hospital pharmacy. This approach is inefficient and error-prone, because the support personnel often split time between administering medication and performing other duties. Further, to the extent that records of medication doses are kept, those records of medication doses are kept manually by the support personnel themselves. If the personnel are hurried, they may not keep accurate records of medication doses. In addition, the medication doses may not be correct because a harried support person failed to fill the prescription properly.
Yet another concern is the precise placement of the various sensors used to sense a patient's vital signs through physical contact with the patient's body. For example, an EKG sensor operates by sensing electrical activity within the body, and must be placed strategically on the body best to detect this electrical activity. Similarly, other types of sensors must be placed carefully and precisely for optimum sensing effectiveness. In the context of remote patient monitoring, it is desirable to avoid requiring medical support personnel to travel to the patient's location to place and check the various sensors located on a patient's body. Imposing the expense of such travel on medical support personnel could outweigh any benefits realized by having the patient recuperate at a site remote from the hospital.